In the beginning, there was Monte Vista On-Line Academy. Its state-assigned “pilot project” status signaled its daring, and its 13 students, wired up and logged on, were spared hours of bumping along rugged San Luis Valley roads to and from brick-and-mortar schools.

Now, no longer provisional or experimental, and championed by a strange-bedfellows mix of parents, school-choice advocates and social activists, online schools are a fixture of the Colorado landscape from rural outposts to inner cities.

Yet as online schools grow, offering solutions for many students who struggle in traditional schools, so do questions about performance and practice.

Each fall, thousands of kids enroll in online schools — in 2010, the number was 15,249, or nearly 2 percent of the state’s K-12 total. And each year, thousands disappear from attendance rolls after the annual October head count that determines schools’ per-pupil funding.

Those who remain generally fare worse on standardized testing than students in traditional schools, even as millions of taxpayer dollars feed a system that lurches ahead with sporadic official oversight.

“This thing is growing by leaps and bounds and it’s without controls in place that are appropriate or necessary for fully accredited programs,” said online pioneer Lorenzo Trujillo, who headed an investigative commission in 2007 whose report served as the foundation for online regulations now in place.

Trujillo compared the diversity of online schools to “the vegetable bin at the grocery store.”

“The commonality,” he added, “is that valuable attempt to meet the needs of nontraditional students.”

Most troubling to critics are the vast numbers of students enrolled in online schools — authorized by charter authorities and brick-and-mortar districts — who seemingly disappear each year, according to data supplied by the schools to the Colorado Department of Education.

In the fall of 2009, the state’s largest online school, Colorado Virtual Academy, reported enrollment of 5,006. By the end of the school year, state records show, COVA had lost just more than 1,000 students, or 21 percent of its initial enrollment. With state per-pupil payments of about $6,000, based on its fall head count the state paid COVA roughly $6 million to educate students who were gone by the end of the year.

At the state’s third largest online program, Insight School of Colorado, enrollment plummeted by more than half from the fall of 2009 to the end of the school year in 2010.

“That’s something we take very seriously and are looking at,” said Amy Anderson, assistant commissioner of innovation and choice for the Colorado Department of Education.

State Sen. Brandon Shaffer, a Longmont Democrat who is running for Congress, wants to take a look at it, too.

Last week, Shaffer called for a state audit of online schools, saying the plummeting enrollment after the October count suggests student rosters have been inflated to maximize funding from the state.

Leaders at for-profit K12 Inc., which operates two of Colorado’s largest online schools, say they favor changing the state’s funding system from the current one based on a single-day student census to a process that calculates the average number of days a student is enrolled.

In January, a consultant’s report to CDE recommended doing just that, in order for school funding to more closely reflect the distribution of students.

Heidi Heineke-Magri, director of COVA, one of K12’s schools, said the tendency of online students to move around exceeds even the ever-increasing mobility of traditional students.

“We tend to have kids who just need to get a couple credits” online to get back on track and return to a traditional school, she said. She estimated that two-thirds of the high-school students who enroll in COVA are behind their grade level in credits they need to graduate.

Heineke-Magri said COVA tracks why students leave the school, and the number one reason they give is that they are returning to a traditional school.

Still, drop-out rates — kids who leave education altogether — are higher among online students than their traditional-school peers.

Online proponents point out that nearly all their students come from traditional schools where things weren’t working out.

Juan Cervantes is one of those kids.

“I used to hang around with the wrong kind of people and get in trouble,” he said at the Center of Hope Academy in Lakewood, one of Hope Online’s 47 learning center sites around the state.

Learning center students work at their own pace online, but in a classroom, where teachers and aides hover around them.

Even at Hope, Cervantes didn’t flourish at first. He got in trouble, missed classes, generally kept up his old ways, school director Lavinia Lovato said, until she sat him down for a heart-to-heart talk.

Now, he’s the learning center’s success story, with plans to graduate in a year and a half.

In the meantime, the talent he’s shown as a third-grade soccer coach convinced Lovato that Cervantes, 15, is a teacher in the making.

Taking hard cases

Across the hall from Cervantes’classroom is a small room specially outfitted with cribs, rocking chairs and soft carpeting so teen moms can work on their studies with their babies nearby.

Troubled kids, parenting teens, kids with learning disabilities, kids who’ve been tossed from traditional schools, kids so smart they’re bored in traditional schools — all are part of the population that make up online students.

Only two online schools have been designated Alternative Education Campuses — a status that recognizes the challenges of educating high numbers of students in poverty, or whose families are in crisis.

One of those is GOAL Academy, which qualifies because more than 95 percent of its students share one or more of 14 characteristics the state uses to define a “high-risk student.” Administrators say the school takes students others won’t — including kids who won’t graduate within four years — because they count against a school’s graduation rate.

“It’s the right thing to do for society,” said Ken Crowell, the school’s executive director. “Our goal is to get these kids with a life plan that’s going to launch them to be successful, taxpaying citizens. Despite the way the statistics pop up, we have no control over those. They’re just the reality we live with.”

GOAL began as part of the Cesar Chavez Charter School Network, which was plagued last year by scandal. This year, authorizer Colorado Charter School Institute made it an independent entity and ordered a ground-up reconstruction.

“I equate it to flying an airplane while you’re still building it,” Crowell said.

Meanwhile, GOAL’s test scores and graduation rates pull down CSI’s overall numbers — a scenario that some complain is unfair. But Crowell acknowledges that time is short to prove its approach to helping hard cases actually works.

“If schools like GOAL Academy don’t work, what option would these students have?” he said. “It’s not a drop-out rate, let’s be honest. It’s a push-out rate, because (traditional) schools need to make themselves look good in the political light.”

Even among students who remain, performance at online schools has stubbornly hung below that of brick-and-mortar schools. In 2010, six online schools clung to the bottom rung of the state’s four-tiered ranking system.

The percentage of students achieving proficient or advanced status on CSAP, the state’s annual measure of academic achievement, lags significantly in all categories and in some cases grows worse with each advancing grade level.

In 2010, barely 9 percent of online 10th graders scored well in math; slightly more than 27 percent in writing. Among 10th-graders enrolled in traditional schools that year, about 32 percent were proficient or better in math; nearly 49 percent in writing.

Trying to find a fit

Almost anyone involved with online education repeats the same mantra: it’s not for everyone.

Some families have thrived in the online environment, though probably few to the extent of Stephanie Martinez and her kids. After a brief try at home schooling, she turned to the online option.

Eight years ago, the family moved into a six-bedroom house in Green Valley Ranch, and Martinez designated one bedroom as the kids’study area. She set up desks along the walls, added maps, a globe, charts featuring fractions and multiplication tables and an illustration of the solar system.

Martinez’s oldest, 20-year-old Selina, graduated from COVA and attends community college with an eye toward enrolling at the University of Colorado Denver next spring. Son Chris, 17, has thrived on the flexible schedule and challenging course offerings at Colorado Connections Academy. Matt, 15, also works through Colorado Connections and Stephanie, 13, studies with COVA.

When her husband died four years ago, Martinez requested — and got — more male teachers for her sons. Beyond the normal academic monitoring, those teachers called regularly just to “check in” on the boys, she said.

The Martinezes’ situation contains one element that virtually all online advocates describe as essential: an involved adult supervising the process.

“My normal school day is 14 hours,” says Martinez. “If you’re not an involved parent, this is not a program to be in, in any online school.”

In Woodland Park, the online option also provided a good fit for April Riggs, who enrolled her daughter in Branson Online after the events of 9/11 and Columbine made her hyperaware of safety at a traditional school. She later enrolled her son.

“By the time my daughter was in third grade, she was independent enough to contact her teacher if she had a question about one of her classes,” Riggs said. “I liked fact they were learning how to be self-starters. That was icing on the cake.”

The tiny Branson School District, a speck on the map near the New Mexico border, became one of the early online providers even though its traditional enrollment numbers hovered around two or three dozen. And after some early administrative missteps, Branson Online has emerged among the better schools in terms of performance and retention.

Its enrollment this year will be about 450 students spread around the state, largely along the Interstate 25 corridor and to the west. The school’s 28 teachers work from homes throughout Colorado, as does principal Leanna Christians, who lives in Castle Rock.

Unlike most online schools in Colorado, Branson doesn’t contract with a larger company to administer its program, preferring what Christians calls a “home-grown” approach that also includes efforts to build community among its student families.

Most of Branson’s new students arrive by word of mouth. The school’s $40,000 advertising budget permits some radio spots, but the outreach efforts consist primarily of a volunteer setting up a booth at county fairs and other local events.

But a few years ago, as the school’s enrollment ballooned over 1,000, Branson ran into financial difficulty when a state audit found problems with the way it tallied enrollment. Branson said the errors were made in a good-faith effort to follow unclear count-day rules, but the issues covered five years and required payback to the state of $646,767 in per pupil funding.

Last year, the district sought support through a mill levy override. It passed easily.

Following the money

Financial concerns form the basis for much of the controversy surrounding for-profit online enterprises.

In 2010, the company reported net income of $21.5 million, up 74.8 percent from the year before.

One reason Tisch and Packard cite for the enormous income growth is K12’s acquisition of former competitors. In 2010, K12 bought KC Distance Learning, which owned the Aventa Learning brand of online curriculum. In 2009, seven of the 25 Colorado online schools that bought curriculum from an outside vendor used Aventa Learning.

But sizeable chunks of K12’s revenue comes from the online schools it manages in 29 states.

In 2010, COVA paid its parent company $22 million — or $4,358 for each of the 4,595 Colorado students it reported in October of that year — in “professional services” and “technology service fees.”

Though COVA ranks as the state’s largest online school, its spending on “professional services” was more than 20 times greater than the next-highest school. Colorado Connections Academy spent $1,093 per student.

K12 officials said the money was used for student computers, technology and a national teacher training program, as well as supplies and advertising.

“We believe in sending kids everything they need,” said Mary Gifford, regional senior vice president of school services.

CDE’s Anderson pointed out that under a new law, online schools will be required to file detailed financial statements.

In Colorado, each online school must be authorized by an existing public school district, which oversees matters like curriculum and standards, often in exchange for fees or a percentage of the online school’s state funding.

Though it authorizes Insight School of Colorado, the small Julesburg School District has only one student enrolled full time in the online program. But last year the district netted a little more than $500,000 for serving as authorizer — a role that carried significant costs only in the first year of operation, said district superintendent Shawn Ehnes.

The additional revenue has allowed Julesburg to withstand massive loss of state funding, retain two music teachers, add technology and install geothermal heating systems at the elementary and high school.

But because online enrollment dwarfs traditional enrollment, the online school’s “turnaround” status has become a drag on district-wide accreditation.

If Insight doesn’t make progress over the next five years, the state could step in and not only shut down the online operation but reorganize the entire district, Ehnes said. A performance clause in the contract with Insight gives the district an out, and he’s tracking progress closely.

“From the standpoint of district achievement, we don’t view it as, ‘Just send us the check and we don’t care,'” Ehnes said. “Ultimately, if the financial gains are a driving force, it’s in our best interest to make sure this is a long-term relationship. It’s advantageous for us to get this right.”

As part of its state-ordered improvement plan, Insight has revamped its enrollment process, revised student assessments and instituted one-on-one counseling and a student performance agreement.

“The students who enroll and go through all of the steps are the ones who truly want to be here and understand what online learning is about,” said executive director Chuck Wolfe, who anticipates enrollment of 700 to 750 this year. “I think that, in itself, is going to produce a more committed student that’s going to stay longer.”

Quality concerns and backlash over attrition and completion rates are an inevitable byproduct of online learning’s hype and rampant growth, say some experts.

Brent Wilson, professor of information and learning technologies at the University of Colorado Denver, one of the few schools to offer a graduate certificate in online teaching, notes that the re-examination ultimately will produce a better product.

“Data will bite back,” he said. “But the pushback of the data isn’t going to stop the phenomenon. It’ll make us reflect and make sure it’s being done well.”

Kevin Simpson has covered a wide variety of topics at The Denver Post while working as a sports writer, metro columnist and general assignment reporter with a focus on long-form pieces. A graduate of the University of Missouri, he arrived in Colorado in 1979 and spent five years covering sports at the Rocky Mountain News before joining The Post.